1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is in the broad field of telecommunications, and pertains more particularly to enhancing continuity in communication transactions.
2. Description of Related Art
Call center (CC) operations and the machine intelligence providing many intelligent functions, such as agent-level routing, parallel data transfer and the like is a well-developed art. Most persons are familiar at least with contacting a call center in an attempt to access customer service for a hardware or a software problem or to update a product or software, for example. Such persons will understand that a service request may not always be satisfactorily resolved in a single call. Sometimes one or more call-backs will be necessary, and sometimes the requesting customer may have to be referred to another call CC or even another enterprise. Many products and services, for example, are provided through enterprise partnership.
Existing solutions typically require businesses (e.g. call centers) to maintain customer information and business context in some combination of locally managed systems, such as CRM systems, LDAP repositories, and so forth. Businesses typically supply customers with short tokens, such as case IDs and ticket numbers, and rely upon the customer to supply these tokens on subsequent inquiries related to the service. Subsequent interactions typically consist of a workflow at least similar to the following:                1. Customer interacts with business over some medium, and is prompted to recall the service token.        2. Agent and customer wait while the token ID is located.        3. Agent and customer wait while customer and service information is pulled from the CRM or other data repository.        4. Customer's identity is confirmed.        5. Service is continued.        
This workflow simply reflects operations at a single call center, and the workflow becomes ever more complicated and more frustrating in the case of operations and multiple contacts spanning different call centers and different enterprises.
What is clearly needed is a portable continuity object that is not a captive of a single call center or a single enterprise, that will provide interfaces for obtaining and submitting business context and other data, providing a unified view of customer activity, thereby enabling enhanced personalization and continuity of service.